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The Kamloops Daily News is closing due to declining revenues and high costs, but the industry says this does not signal distress in the daily newspaper business as a whole.

“This is the first major market paid daily that we’ve seen close in recent memory,” Newspapers Canada president and CEO John Hinds said.

Twenty-one English-language daily newspapers still operate in B.C., ranging from the Alaska Highway News in Fort St. John to The Vancouver Sun and the free 24 Hours Vancouver.

Hinds said it would be a mistake to see the Kamloops Daily News closure as an indication of further daily newspaper closures to come.

“There’s a reality of the newspaper industry, but local advertising, labour and the community economy all play into it,” Hinds said. “I don’t know where that local advertising dollar (in Kamloops) went.”

Both the number of Canadian newspapers and newspaper revenue have been fairly stable over the past few years, Hinds said. While revenue dipped along with the economy, “we haven’t seen the great dips in circulation they’ve seen in the U.S.,” he said.

In 2013, only one Canadian paid daily newspaper changed status — the Amherst Daily News in Nova Scotia became a weekly newspaper, Hinds said.

“Newspapers don’t have an audience problem,” he said. “There’s a big fallacy out there. We have a revenue problem as we transition to cross-platform materials ­— how do we pay for those? Our audiences are bigger than ever and actually growing.”

B.C. is a particularly competitive market compared to the rest of the country, with Black Press and Glacier Media vying “really strongly” for market share in the communities while Pacific Newspaper Group owns the two provincial dailies, Hinds said. Black Press and Glacier swapped a number of titles in the Greater Vancouver area late last year.

“Part of this is a kind of shaking out of the newspaper industry,” Hinds said.

Glacier Media, which owns the Kamloops Daily News, did not say how many people will be affected by the closure, which will take place within the next 60 days, but Rob Munro, vice-president of the Media Union of B.C. said 34 full-time staff and 12 contracted delivery drivers will be affected.

In a story posted on the Kamloops Daily News website, publisher Tim Shoults said the newspaper was unable to sufficiently cut costs.

“We have struggled for the last several years, worked tirelessly and taken many difficult steps along the way which were designed to ensure our future,” Shoults said.

“Unfortunately the realities of our industry, our local advertising market and our labour situation were too great for us to overcome.”

Glacier Media wasn’t immediately available for comment.

The closure comes three months after Glacier Media decided to contract out advertising production to India and the Philippines for a number of its publications, including the Kamloops Daily News, which lost five non-unionized staff.

“The community newspaper industry in B.C. is very healthy,” said Anne Crassweller, president of NADbank, which measures Canadian newspaper audience and readership.

“Eight in 10 Canadians read a daily newspaper at least once a week in Canada. Nearly three-quarters read a printed copy every week,” Crassweller said. “All the newspaper companies are struggling because the world has changed, consumers have changed, technology has changed, but you have readers. Isn’t that the bottom line? The audience is there.”

Print readership in B.C. has been steady over the past five years both for daily and weekly readership, according to NADbank data.

Half of the population in the B.C. markets that NADbank measures (Vancouver, Victoria, Kamloops and Prince George) read a printed newspaper daily, and three-quarters read a newspaper at least once over the course of a week. Website readership of weekly newspapers has increased to 20 per cent from 17 per cent over the past five years. B.C. readership numbers are fairly comparable to the other regions across the country.

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